NARRATOR: Up next on NOVA, Cracking the Maya Code. NARRATOR: In the 16th century, the flames of the Spanish Inquisition scorched the New World, decimating the Maya civilization. One blaze was ignited ...

The Inca Empire managed vast territories without a written alphabet, relying instead on a mysterious system of knotted strings known as the khipu. Once dismissed as simple accounting tools, new ...

From deciphering burnt Roman scrolls to reading crumbling cuneiform tablets, neural networks could give researchers more data than they’ve had in centuries. In October 2023, an e-mail pinged onto ...

The encrypted initiation rite of an ancient German secret society preoccupied with ophthalmology has fallen to modern language analysis tools including an online automatic translator. The 19th Century ...